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Jarvis Montaque, teen shot to death on doorstep, was targeted, police say

As the family of Jarvis Montaque — the teen shot to death just outside his front door Sunday night — grieves, police, city leaders rallied Tuesday to speak on community safety after four youths under age 16 have died by gun in four weeks.

Inside the brown brick townhome where 15-year-old Jarvis Montaque spent two short years, the front hallway is crammed with shoes and the door is hardly ever closed as visitors stream inside to console and cook and sit with the family he left behind.

A small boy bangs on a pot with a spoon on the kitchen floor. Whenever someone says “Jarvis,” he says: “gone.”

Sisters, four of 10, sit huddled around the kitchen table, trying to make sense of how their sweet brother — who always arrived promptly home from school, safe inside these walls — won’t ever walk through that same door at 3 p.m. again.

Montaque was shot in the chest by an unknown male on Sunday, just outside his front steps off Jamestown Cres. in Rexdale, while listening to music with friends.

“When we have to close our eyes and go to sleep and know that he’s not here. . . ” said older sister Tanasha Smith, 33. She doesn’t continue.

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In the wake of the shooting, the city has also begun to toss and turn, desperately seeking help to solve a murder from within the community while looking for long-term solutions to tackle youth violence and restore safety to fractured neighbourhoods.

The chief of police, city councillors, housing officials and community leaders rallied Tuesday to speak on community safety after four youths under age 16 have died by gun in four weeks.

But the answers are complex and the path unclear as each group weighs in on priorities.

“It must be absolutely terrible to lose your son or daughter at 15,” Mayor Rob Ford told Newstalk 1010 at City Hall on Tuesday. But it’s frustrating. I don’t know what more we can do. . . We’re trying our best. If I had an answer for it, I’d implement it.”

Following a board meeting, police Chief Bill Blair said that statistics showing a city-wide reduction in crime may be cold comfort to families like Montaque’s. He added that the whole community needs to work together to keep young people safe.

Meanwhile, Blair’s investigators are pleading with the Rexdale community to help eight dedicated investigators with the probe into Montaque’s murder.

“To make a marketable prosecution, I need witnesses to come forward and tell the truth,” Det.-Sgt. Gary Giroux, who is leading the investigation, told a news conference Tuesday, referring to the code of silence that often plagues tight-knit neighbourhoods following violence.

Giroux also provided new crime scene details that showed Montaque was shot from three to 3.6 metres away by a semi-automatic pistol. One shell casing was recovered at the scene.

“I’m going to suggest that Jarvis, for an unknown reason at this particular time, was targeted,” Giroux said.

But sister Roshea Gunnis, 23, said that notion is simply inconceivable since her brother had few friends in the community and kept to himself after moving only two years ago from Jamaica to the home where her family has lived for 20 years.

“He couldn’t have been targeted,” she said. “Usually he’s not really the one to be out there.”

Before he was shot, Montaque went to the nearby Pizza Depot to buy chicken wings with friends. They snacked on some before dropping the order off for his family, who were inside watching a movie.

The girls laugh now, how their brother had asked for “hot” wings, because he wanted them to be fresh — warm — and how when he’d brought them home the girls nearly burnt their mouths from the spice.

The movie was blasting just before 11 p.m., but the single gunshot still cut through the noise.

Montaque’s stepmother, Maureen, who had raised the teen since he was a toddler after his mother died, rose from her seat in the living room, looking towards the front door before one of Montaque’s friends burst through it, yelling about her son.

From there it’s a blur. The family rushed outside towards the nearby laneway where the teen was slumped, foaming from the mouth. Both friends were at his side after being separated from him as they scrambled from the gunfire, one performing CPR while the other tried to staunch the flow of blood.

“He was still breathing when he left here,” Gunnis said.

Now she and her sisters are left with memories — how he was always looking out for them, dancing to reggae with them, making them laugh. They trade their stories back and forth at the table.

Montaque travelled from Jamaica with his younger sister for a better life. Standing in the kitchen, Aaliyah, 14, can hardly speak. The other girls say Montaque was her “heartbeat.”

Though he struggled in school in his native country, when he arrived in Canada he picked up his grades, had dreams of being a pilot, then joining the army. He wanted to move out on his own.

“He did everything that we were scared to do,” Gunnis said. Montaque, who was growing into a man’s body, would often walk to the bus stop to accompany her home in the dark. “If he continued, you would hear nothing but goodness,” she said. “You would have heard of him. Not in this way.”

They’re left to wonder when answers will come after watching how other families were left to grieve three other boys lost in the last month: Tyson Bailey, 15; Kesean Williams, 9; and St. Aubyn Rodney, 15. There have been charges laid in only one of these cases.

“We’re just next in line,” Smith said. “As long as I am living, it’s going to be solved.”

The family has established a trust fund to send Montaque’s body back to Jamaica, where he still spent his summers, for burial. Donations can be made to the TD Canada Trust account under Tanasha Smith, Transit #02622, Branch #004, Account #78766661997.

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